CHI 2013 Workshop

Designing Gamification: Creating Gameful and Playful Experiences

In recent years, gamification – the use of game design elements in non-game contexts – has seen rapid adoption in the software industry, as well as a growing body of research. However, little is known about the effective designing of such gameful systems. This one-day workshop, co-located with the CHI 2013 conference in Paris, France, therefore convenes 15-20 researchers and industry practitioners to identify current practices, challenges, and open questions in the design of gameful systems.

Organisation

The workshop hopes to maximise productive and engaging exchange by offloading papers and slides into documents shared ahead of the workshop. The first half of the day will consist of collecting and prioritising relevant questions and discussing them in World Café-style. During the second half, breakout groups led by industry practitioners will tackle the identified themes, sharing results with the plenum and discussing follow-up plans. Among other things, we are planning a journal special issue based on the best workshop papers.

Submission

Interested participants are asked to submit a 3-4 page position paper in the CHI extended abstract format, plus a 50-word biography, by January 11 18, 2013. Practitioners and researchers with first-hand experience in designing gameful systems may alternatively submit a slide deck outlining their experiences and observations. Papers, slide decks, and biographies will be published online on the workshop site. Details can be found under “How to submit.” Submission is now closed.

Registration

Note that as with previous CHI conferences, workshop participants are required to register for the workshop and at least one day of the main conference. Registration will soon be possible through the CHI 2013 main site. For a rough idea of conference rates, confer to the CHI 2012 site.

Workshop Background

Gameful design or gamification refers to the design of hardware and software employing design elements from games, usually for the purpose of affording gameful and playful user experiences to motivate user behavior and increase joy of use. Following the rapid ascent of gamification in the commercial industry, Human-computer interaction (HCI) and game researchers have begun to study the effectiveness of gameful systems, as well as more complex questions involved in their use and adoption, like privacy issues or design ethics. However, little academic attention has been paid to the designing of gameful systems.

While there are tested, formalized and institutionalized methods for designing functional software and games, and serious game design is starting to be formalized and studied as well, there are currently no established, let alone empirically tested methods for the design of gameful systems. Industry practitioners have published various materials on the design of gameful systems. Yet these tend to remain at the level of rather incomplete and abstract guidelines. They also exclusively focus on the ‘adding’ of a ‘game layer’ to existing systems – little is said about designing a new gameful system from scratch. Most importantly, current industry practitioners do not document the rationale behind the processes they suggest, nor is any data on their actual empirical effectiveness (and complications) available.

Building on the first CHI workshop on gamification in 2011, this CHI 2013 workshop therefore to bring together HCI and game researchers with industry practitioners to take stock of existing design approaches to gameful systems, identify specific challenges, lessons learned and best practices, and from there, extrapolate the most important open questions for research. The workshop will address the following questions:

What approaches, concepts, tools, and methods are currently used in creating gameful systems?

What specific challenges, issues and pitfalls commonly emerge in the design of gameful systems? What best practices have been established to deal with them?

Do gameful systems require concepts and methods of evaluation different from those developed for game user experiences in general?

Are there unexplored opportunities for game and user experience design to inform gameful design?

What empirical evidence exists on the effectiveness and efficiency of currently employed approaches?

Are there contexts with significantly different opportunities and constraints demanding different approaches to designing a gameful system?

What are the most important open research questions regarding the design of gameful systems, and how might they be approached?